May 7th, 1536: The Faith of the Prisoner

"Of body small,
Of power regal,
She is, and sharp of sight;
Of courage hault,
No manner fault
Is in this falcon white."
- A ballad for Anne Boleyn's Coronation, written by Nicholas Udall (1504 - 1556), Headmaster of Eton College

Note

I would like to apologise for the day-long delay in getting the May 7th post up. Yesterday was my birthday supper and I spent the day in the kitchen cooking a steak and guinness pie, followed by malteser and toblerone cheesecake, with a few friends - Kerry, Lucy, Natalie, Dean, Grace and Aisleagh - stopping by at 7:30. It all turned out very well, so I was very pleased, and like the Queen of England 474 years earlier, on May 7th I had "a great dinner". Unlike her, however, that was because of the company, not despite it!

*

May 7th, 1536 was the first Sunday the Queen had spent in prison. The day before, Saturday, Thomas Cromwell had visited the fortress to consult privately with Sir William Kingston about the prisoners and the Queen in particular. As a result, Kingston had not made his customary visit to the Queen’s Apartments, nor had he taken his supper with her as usual, as a mark of respect for her royal status. Given how much she detested many of the servants now assigned to watch over her, Anne had missed Sir William’s company and enquired to one of her maids - perhaps the inoffensive Mrs. Stonor or Mrs. Orchard - why he had not visited her the day before, as usual.

May 6th, 1536: The Mystery of the Queen's Letter

“At the close of life, thoughts hitherto unthinkable rise into the mind of one who meets his fate with resignation; they are like good spirits that diffuse their radiance upon the summits of the past.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

On the fourth day of her imprisonment, legend has it that Anne Boleyn wrote a letter to her estranged husband, King Henry VIII, in which she asked for a fair trial, mercy for her fellow prisoners and hinted at Jane Seymour being the reason for her downfall. This letter was allegedly found amongst the papers of Thomas Cromwell, after he was executed for treason in 1540 – which implies that if the letter is in fact genuine, it was intercepted by Cromwell and never reached the King. Scrawled across the top in what seems to be Cromwell’s handwriting: “To the King from the Lady in the Tower”.

In his The Reformation in England, J.H. Merle d’Aubigny wrote admiringly of the letter, “We see Anne thoroughly in this letter, one of the most touching that was ever written. Injured in her honour, she speaks without fear, as one on the threshold of eternity. If there were no other proofs of her innocence, this document alone would suffice to gain her cause in the eyes of an impartial and intelligent posterity.”

May 5th, 1536: The Final Arrests

“In satisfying her carnal appetite she fled not so much as the company of her own brother besides the company of three or four others of the gallantest gentlemen that were near about the king’s proper person.”
- Sir William Thomas, Clerk of the Privy Council (d. 1554)

Friday May 5th marked a difficult day for the Queen of England. Having finally understood the terrible truth that her brother, George, had been arrested on a charge of adulterous incest with her, she spent much of the morning crying and at one point nearly fainted, screaming, “My brother will die!” After lunch, she seemed to have reined in her hysteria and instead began to worry about the fates of the other men who were also sharing her prison – she feared that they might not be looked after properly and asked if anyone was making their beds for them. (Perhaps to find out if they even had beds or were being held in one of the Tower’s more horrible locations.) One of her ladies-in-waiting cattily responded that it was her interest in such obscene matters as what gentlemen's beds were like which had brought her to her current calamity.

It was apparently this latest act of wholly unnecessary bullying which marked a change in Anne Boleyn’s attitude the ladies around her. Having previously hoped that they might eventually feel sorry for her, she now realised that this was not going to happen. Far from sympathising, they were in fact taking great pleasure in adding to her misery at every available opportunity - taunting her with unwelcome information about her co-accused or moralising about the reasons for her destruction. The two worst offenders were Anne’s aunt-by-marriage, Lady Boleyn, and Mrs. Coffin – they refused to answer any of the Queen’s queries about where her father was (had he been arrested too?) and how had her mother taken the news of her arrest? Faced with this treatment, Anne decided that she was not going to give the two women an opportunity to do it again and she used the only weapon she had left in her arsenal – etiquette.

May 4th, 1536: The Public Reaction

“A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.”
– Marie-Louise de la Ramée (1839 – 1908)

In the early afternoon of May 4th, two days after the Queen’s arrest, Sir William Brereton was arrested as the fifth of Anne Boleyn's alleged lovers and conducted to the Tower.

Of all Anne’s lovers, it was Brereton who seemed the least plausible candidate - with the obvious exception of her brother. Mark Smeaton had been noticeably attracted to the Queen physically, Henry Norris had constantly been in her company and Francis Weston was a known womaniser; Brereton, on the other hand, was neither close to the Queen personally, nor particularly attractive. Writing several years later, a palace servant spoke for many when he said, “If any of them was innocent, it was he.”

May 3rd, 1536: The Lady in the Tower

“She hath wept bitterly in the night, and her tears are upon her cheeks: there is none to comfort her among all them that were dear to her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, and are become her enemies.”
- The Book of Lamentations, Chapter 1, verse 2

Unlike poor Marie-Antoinette two centuries later, Anne Boleyn did not spend her final days in deprivation. In fact, by most normal standards she spent them in great luxury. Whilst Marie-Antoinette would shiver in a dank cell in the Conciergerie prison, with holes in her shoes and the revolutionary guards shouting obscene comments at her as she changed her menstrual linen, Anne Boleyn was housed in rooms which, only three years earlier, had been re-decorated for her Coronation week to the equivalent of £1.28 million ($2 million.) Furthermore, almost £9,000 ($13,700) was soon forwarded to the Tower by the government to finance the Queen’s food and clothes during her imprisonment. 

The last time she had frequented these palatial Tower rooms, Anne had been on the cusp of her greatest triumph and the rooms had played host to a series of elaborate parties to celebrate. The Queen’s audience chamber, her dining room, her bedroom, her bathroom and her private oratory were all as she remembered them – the last word in luxury and style. However, this time there were no flashing jewels and smiling faces as the Queen entered the apartments, instead only the grimly disapproving faces of those who had been assigned to watch over her throughout her captivity.

May 2nd, 1536: The Queen's Arrest

"And down the river's dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance --
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892), The Lady of Shalott

On the morning of May 2nd 1536, Anne Boleyn awoke as usual in her luxurious four-poster bed, with its silken sheets and golden tassels imported from Florence. Despite her husband's abrupt departure from the Mayday jousts the day before, there was no sign that this day was going to be different from any other.

The Queen's ladies of the bedchamber were already waiting to dress her in the morning’s preliminary outfit – a long robe, a bit like a dressing gown, was placed over a relatively simple linen dress and the Queen ate breakfast in the privacy of her rooms before a screen was erected in front of her for Mass. Since she was in her dishabille, it was customary for the Queen to hear the morning service from behind a screen on days which were not holy days or great festivals. So, with a mantilla draped over her head and her prayer book in her hands, Anne heard one of her chaplains celebrate the Mass, before she retired back to her bedchamber to be dressed properly.

Noted for her interest in fashion, as well as for her extravagance, Queen Anne usually spent about £12,000 ($18,000) on clothes in an average month – not counting expenditure for great events of State, when her outfits were famously breathtaking. Even on "normal" days, like this one, she was always immaculately coiffed and styled and even one of her most hostile critics described her as "the glass of fashion."

May 1st, 1536: Mayday

Part of a series of posts beginning today on the downfall of Anne Boleyn

“For her, my lord,
I dare my life lay down and will do't, sir,
Please you to accept it, that the Queen is spotless
I' the eyes of heaven and to you; I mean,
In this which you accuse her.”
- William Shakespeare's The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene I

On a warm Mayday afternoon in 1536, Henry VIII and his queen, Anne Boleyn, took their places in the royal box outside the red-brick banqueting house of Greenwich Palace, the king’s favourite river-side home.

Mayday – the first day of May – was one of the English Court’s annual social highlights. It marked the beginning of the summer “Season”, in contrast to the relative restraint imposed by Lent, which had ended a few weeks earlier. At Court, the day was traditionally celebrated with a series of afternoon jousts, in which the most athletic of the male courtiers would compete against one another in the tilt. Ordinarily, the sporty sovereign took great pride in being the centre of attention at such events, but this year – for the first time – Henry was not competing following a particularly dangerous fall from his horse back in January. The King’s injury meant that the most celebrated of the day’s jousters consisted of the Queen’s brother, Lord Rochford, the handsome playboy Sir Francis Weston, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt and the King’s Master of the Horse, Sir Nicholas Carew – along with a host of other well-born competitors.

Sitting next to one another, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn still cut an attractive – even a magnificent – pair. Admittedly, the King was no longer the “perfect model of manly beauty” that he had been when he came to the throne twenty-seven years earlier, but neither had he degenerated into the monstrous, sweating man-mountain of his later years. In 1536, the muscles on the 6ft 2ins monarch were only just beginning to turn to fat; with the boyish good looks gone but the repulsive obesity still some way off, the 44 year-old King looked every inch the absolute monarch.